Spotlight on Dawar Ali

Dawar runs an innovative business called Recruitico. He provides offshore remote staff – hiring highly skilled people overseas in Pakistan; getting them to work remotely for businesses in the UK. Primarily software developers, website developers, designers and digital marketing professionals. The business started in 2018.

What was your first business in Pakistan?

When I was in the final year of my A-levels in Islamabad, Pakistan, we had something called the student union in our school. You have different positions - you have a president, vice president, etc. I ran for president and I got elected somehow! One of the roles was to organise lots of events. Over the course of the year, we organised quite a few events, which included a couple of pretty big ones; some of which involved selling tickets.

It was totally non-commercial just to support the school. I looked at how it worked and thought “hang on a second, we can make some money from this”. That's how the first business started organising events on a commercial basis.

After I finished my A-levels, I went to my parents and said I wanted to take a year off. Back in Pakistan, taking a year off was pretty much unheard of. The norm is you go straight from school to uni, and then you graduate, you get a job, you get married and have kids, you settle down and that's how you do it! This whole taking a year off things just doesn't go right with most parents, but my parents very kindly said “ok, do whatever you want, get it out your system!”

So, I started an events management company. We did pretty much exactly what we did for the school, just on a slightly bigger scale. We got some sponsors from local businesses. We put on a few events, including a couple of pretty midscale theatre plays, which went on for a few days. We made some money from all of that, it was all going well. Then the year came to an end. It actually got extended to a bit more than a year because I was planning to go abroad and had to get the admissions process sorted – it took 2 years in the end!

The first “proper” business that I'm still involved in started a few years ago. I was working as a marketing manager for a local company in Northampton. I always wanted to work for myself and to have my own business. This job was only a way to gain some experience because I was in a new place, new country. What happened was we had this project that needed doing it - it was a massive database of about 3040,000 records that needed sorting. It was a two month project, which we didn't have anyone in house to do. I suggested to get a student in Pakistan to do it. We’ll pay them really well and if you look at the exchange rate, his living costs, it's going to work out really cost-effective over here. Through some contacts, I managed to get a couple of university students in Pakistan who worked on these Excel sheets. They were over the moon as they got this summer job, which has paying them really well. We got this project done. It was a win-win situation.

That idea stuck. I thought this was something I could focus on, because I'm in a unique position to actually do this.

Being from Pakistan, I understand the culture over there, I understand how to work with people and I have lived and worked in the UK for long enough to understand how the culture and business over here works. So I can put something together that can be quite beneficial for everyone and make it into a valuable business myself.

What’s your why? What actually gets you out of bed in the morning? I can look at this from quite a few different angles and maybe it changes, or it may have changed over time. I think what I do really excites me. Many times we managed to solve pretty big problems for small businesses, or we managed to do things for small businesses, which were quite difficult through our model and the resources that we have. So, that's what excites me - being able to solve problems which were pretty difficult.

On the other hand, with the people who are based overseas, giving them the opportunity that they wouldn't have had - that really drives me. As well as giving the company in the UK, a really high skilled person that they wouldn't be able to afford here. Looking at people's reactions, when something sets up that works - that's a very good feeling.

What makes you different from your competitors? We don't have many people doing what we do in the local area. However, there are lots of businesses who are involved in this similar model, mostly at a much bigger level. One type of competitor are the big freelance marketplaces, who seem to be similar to what we do. The way we're different is we're offering the same sort of service, but it's more personal, it's more bespoke towards our clients’ needs.

They’re dealing with a smaller business, who understands how small businesses work. As opposed to dealing with a big corporation, that is just a massive website or a marketplace, like Upwork or Fiverr, or something like that. There are companies out there who do what we do at a much bigger scale for much bigger companies. For small businesses, they won't be able to work with such bigger companies because their minimum requirements would be out of reach.

What would you say to people who may have concerns about overseas workers being exploited? In some cases people are saying: are these people going to be paid below minimum wage? And there's a very interesting answer to this question. It needs to be in context. For example, the minimum wage in Luxembourg is about £13 per hour. The minimum wage in the UK is about £9. So, if you actually got somebody from the UK to work at £10 an hour, and you've got a company in Luxembourg to pay £12 for their services, the person in the UK would be working above minimum wage but according to Luxembourg, they would be below minimum wage. And the company that's paying them will be saving money, and whoever set it up will be making a little bit of a profit, is that exploitation in any way? The person is getting more than they would get here, the company there saves money, whoever sets it up makes a profit. Now it sounds like a win-win-win situation for everyone.

One thing that we do guarantee is that all our staff will be taken care of really well. That is proven by the fact that we currently have nine people working for us. They're all highly motivated, they love what we do, and they do an excellent job. They wouldn't do that if they were being exploited.

Since you've been in business, what would you say has been your biggest business challenge? I think there are two ways to look at this. One is the specific challenges that I had running my business, because of the nature of it. Then challenges that any business owners have. When it comes to specific challenges for me - it was a new concept for most people. So it was communicating what we do to people, and then building that trust. Getting people to understand the benefits of what we are offering.

The other challenge, I think a lot of small businesses have - I've learned this through trial and error myself - they think we can do pretty much anything for anyone. They don't know exactly where their target market is. Finding that focus and that target market is not easy. It takes time. What seems like a good idea today may not be what you want to do. You really have to align your objectives and your core competencies with things that you want to do and come up with and with things that you want to focus on. I think we're still doing that, it's an ongoing process, it never stops. If you were to give one top business tip for any business owner out there, what would that top tip be? There are ups and downs and there are times where you feel a bit insecure. You can feel stressed out about things. My advice would be to just keep going. Eventually things do work out. So stay motivated. Just keep focusing on things that you do best. If you've made the decision to start your own business, then stick to it and eventually it will work out.

Watch the interview

For the full video interview, visit here: https://youtu.be/mERAbQoqiY